AWS access key switcher

awsenv is a little tool for switching your AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY environment variables based on profiles configured in ~/.aws/config.

The awscli allows you to switch profiles using --profile <profile_name>, so commands are executed on the proper account. Sadly, not every tool supports this sort of flag, and it's a pain to export them manually whenever you need them.

There are other non-AWS-specific tools to manage environments, but they do not work with AWS configuration/profiles, and often force you to litter your disk with .direnv files and such. They're excellent tools, but I just want to switch AWS profiles!

Usage

pip install awsenv-profiles

This will install a small Python executable, awsenvp, and a bash script, awsenv.sh.

Now, edit your ~/.profile or equivalent and add these lines:

function awsenv_wrapper() {
  eval $(awsenv.sh $1)
}

alias awsenv=awsenv_wrapper

Now, to switch profiles, you can run stuff like this:

$ awsenv prod
$ awsenv dev
... and so on

How it works

awsenvp is a Python program that takes a profile name as an argument and uses botocore to find the credentials for it, then it prints out export commands for AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY. If any failures occur, exit codes are returned to indicate the kind of failure that occurred:

• 3 - You forgot to pass a profile name argument.
• 4 - Profile not found.

awsenv.sh is a wrapper around awsenvp that runs it and handles exit codes appropriately. Since the output of awsenv.sh is always going to be used with eval, if an error occurs it prints out an echo for the failure.

The idea here is that since bash scripts, unless sourced, cannot export environment variables to the parent shell, eval is necessary.

Why the name?

I named it awsenv originally, but needed to change the package name because I didn't realize it was taken on pypi.